Back To The Future : Westminster High Class of ’65 Rode a Wild Wave Into the World

A quarter-century ago, we were the future: the first wave of baby boomers to graduate from high school and step out into the world.

And step into it we did.

The Class of ’65 graduated the year Watts exploded, the year the first American walked in space and the year the government began drafting 18-year-olds with a vengeance as it started committing front-line troops to the war in Vietnam.

We were the last class of innocents. For most of us, drugs were something they did in L.A. or New York. And protesting had something to do with all that fuss in the South. The hipper of us had heard of Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, but mostly it was Beatles and Beach Boys, Righteous Brothers and Rolling Stones.

But we caught on pretty fast. After high school, we got noisy, grew long hair and adopted rock ‘n’ roll as a generational anthem. We discovered drugs and free love and free speech and despised capitalists. We later gave the world yuppies, high-technology entrepreneurs, born-again Christians and the anti-drug movement.

With weighty thoughts like these threatening to turn the evening turgid, I decided several months ago to shake off old anxieties and attend my 25th high school reunion.

It was to be my first time back, and it caused more than one anxiety attack.

“Geez, dad, it’s only high school,” my 8-year-old daughter said during one of my hyperventilating sessions.

You see, high school wasn’t my forte. I wasn’t even energetic enough to join the nerds, who at least got good grades and had their own cliques. It wasn’t hard after graduation to lose touch with classroom acquaintances because I never had that many.

It had been 15 years since I’d seen a fellow graduate, no mean feat considering that I graduated from Westminster High School and haven’t had a permanent residence more than 15-miles-distant in the ensuing 2 1/2 decades.

But I squared my shoulders and determined to go. Nervous as I was about visiting that far back in my past, I was curious to see how my class of ’65 had turned out.

Kay Cessna-- drill team2; choir3; pep club2,3; honor roll4-- surprised me reunion night with the admission that she had undergone the same mix of curiosity and fear.

“I went to the 10th reunion and found myself in a corner the whole night. I was so miserable that I skipped the 15th because I was sure it would be a repeat.”

What Cessna, who has been a county juvenile probation officer for the 21 years since college, found is that no matter what we go on to do, and no matter how much we grow, when we go back we revert to the emotional roles we played then.

“I was talking to one of the football stars,” Cessna said after the reunion, “and he told me he was glad he came because he’d felt so unhappy and isolated in high school, and he was finally able to shake that self-image. And I thought, ‘ Guuuy! We all thought you were soooo bitchin’!’ ”

Cessna said she’d decided to confront her own ghosts by forcing herself into the middle of things.

“So for the 20th reunion, I joined the organizing committee and ended up having a blast.”

The WHS ’65 group, 16 strong, worked for almost 8 months on the reunion, which was held Aug. 11 at the Irvine Marriott Hotel. Cessna was typical of the reunion organizers--active and popular in school, but rarely the social superstars.

Vicki Clark Redding-- drama club2,3; honor roll2; drill team3; speech and debate club4; school newspaper4; banner girl4-- offered one explanation.

The prom queens and superjocks, she said, tended to be “people who were really exceptional, so they stood out in high school, but maybe they didn’t have to work very hard for the attention they got.”

“When you are in the drill team or debating someone from another school,” she said, “you are doing it as much for the honor of your school as for yourself.

“And when you start organizing a reunion, why that takes months of hard work. The people on the committees, I think, are people who cared more about the school and their friends than about their own images.”

Westminster High was founded in 1959 as the second campus in the Huntington Beach Union High School District. It served the largely working-class families settling into the growing sea of hastily built tract homes that were surrounding the small pioneer city of Westminster.

In stark contrast to the multiracial Westminster High School of today--46% Anglo, 26% Latino and 24% Asian, mainly Vietnamese, with a smattering of Pacific Islanders and American Indians--the senior class of 1965 was almost totally white.

We were 88% Anglo and 10% Latino with a handful of Japanese-Americans whose parents once had owned much of the area’s fertile farmland but lost it in the anti-Japanese fervor of World War II.

The class of ’65 was made up largely of the sons and daughters of aerospace and construction workers, farm laborers, local merchants and retired and active military men who had seen Orange County while passing through during World War II or the Korean War and had determined to settle amid its sprawling orange groves and truck farms.

My father first saw the county while in the Navy, and we moved there in 1955. The house my parents bought (for $11,500, with 4% interest and a $1 down payment) was just a half-block from a dairy farm. I was in high school when the dairy came down in the county’s second wave of development to make room for another housing tract--one with some of the greenest lawns you’ll ever see.

My last clear memory of Kim Keturakis --swimming2,3,4; water polo3; varsity club3,4-- was of the ride he gave me one day in his red Triumph TR-3. It was a ride that confirmed my long-distance love affair with sports cars and led me to my first one, a 1965 Alfa Romeo that I bought used in 1967 and went broke trying to keep running.

Keturakis didn’t have a mustache in high school, and he wore horn-rimmed glasses back then, so I can probably be forgiven for not recognizing him as we milled around the foyer of the hotel, waiting to get pictures taken for the reunion memory book.

A military brat like me, he enlisted in the Navy soon after graduating and spent four years as a gunfire control technician, including 20 months in the Vietnam war zone, where the LST on which he was stationed broached in a tropical storm and broke up on offshore reefs.

“All I remember is that the storm kicked up waves that were 30 or 40 feet high, and all of a sudden we were being pushed onto the rocks. It just happened so fast.”

No one was killed in the wreck, but three shipmates were lost “to dumb, stupid accidents” during the 3-month salvage effort that followed, he said.

Being a shipwrecked gunfire control technician might not sound like much to bring back to civilian life, but it introduced Keturakis to computers.

It also introduced him to the shocking facts “that returning vets, in 1969, weren’t heroes and that girl’s skirts were a lot shorter than when I left.”

Keturakis enrolled at Fullerton College--where he met his wife of 19 years--and later transferred to Cal State Fullerton where he earned an undergraduate degree in accounting.

A 3-year stint as a contracts administrator and marketing analyst at Western Digital Corp. led him to discover that sales were a lot more exciting than the financial side of business, so he hopped into a series of sales jobs with several area computer firms.

“But that just taught me that I had trouble working for someone else,” he said. “So in 1977, more as a matter of survival than anything else, I started my own company” customizing, selling and installing data communications systems.

Keturakis recently announced a corporate reorganization at his firm, DMA Communications in Irvine--a reorganization, he said, that leaves him “pretty much retired.”

Why? “Basically, I got bored. The company has done pretty well, so this leaves me free to pursue other things. I’d like to get involved with a start-up company or two, things like that.”

Only 90 of the 120 graduates who attended the reunion--the lowest turnout ever--returned the information sheets that were mailed out.

Betty Sue Turner Crutchfield-- drill team2,3,4 ; student government2-- suggested that the drop-off from the 20th occurred “because we’ve all gone past 40 since then, and it probably bothered some of them.”

There is also the fact that fully half the graduates have dropped out of sight, either through ennui or because they’ve moved away and lost touch.

But among the 90 of us, there are 187 children.

There have been at least 35 divorces, two classmates are widows and one is a widower.

A third of us graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree and a third more have 2-year degrees. There are four law degrees, two MBAs and 10 masters of art or science.

There also are 11 grandchildren.

Michele Rossman Stevens --Latin club1,2,3,4; honor roll1,2,3,4; pep club1; and chemistry club3-- recalled that throughout junior high school and the first 2 years of high school she was often reduced to tears by classmates’ taunts about her size.

By her junior year, however, she had lost considerable weight. And 25 years of conscientious diet and exercise--for a while she studied, and then taught, belly dancing--brought a slim and trim Stevens to the reunion.

“But nobody can know how hard it was for me to come here,” she confided late into the evening. “So many of these people hurt me so much.”

Still later, after visiting with a few old friends and seeing how others responded to her “new” persona (“See that guy over there,” she whispered at one point. “He made me cry all the time in junior high, and I just went up and he looked at me and said I hadn’t changed! He didn’t even remember!”), Stevens confided that it had been worth the trip.

She and her husband, Joel Stevens, had flown in from Skokie, Ill., for the event. It was her first reunion.

A bad first marriage kept her from attending the fifth reunion, she said, and because she didn’t inform the class record keepers of her address--then in Texas--she never received information about subsequent reunions.

But over the years, through a divorce and remarriage to Joel, an engineer, through the raising of their 17-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter, through the long hours she spent building her own business, Stevens had kept in touch with one person from Westminster High--biology instructor Al Stone.

That slim tie kept her thinking, as 1990 wore on, that this was the year of her 25th reunion.

“So finally, I called the school and got the information and made the reservations. I missed the other ones, but the 25th, that’s something special.”

In schools across Illinois, Stevens is known as the lady puppeteer. She writes and performs, with puppets of her own design, shows for audiences ranging from kindergartners to corporate conventioneers. She also performs a “say no to drugs” program in demand at schools throughout the state and has done the puppet work for an educational video and the national television campaign that accompanied its release several years ago.

And when she’s not on stage, she is deeply involved in the animal-rights movement.

“I always have been involved in some kind of cause,” she said. “It makes things worthwhile.”

The Westminster Class of ’65 turned out microchip engineers, plumbers, electricians, musicians, actors, computer programmers, corporate executives, carpenters and just about everything in between, including a railroad brakeman in Fresno, an Orange County district attorney’s investigator, and a deputy director of the Oregon State Lottery.

Beverly Hicks Bellamy-- girls athletics1,2,3,4; Spanish club1,2; pep club2,3,4; honor roll1,2,3,4-- was Georgia’s elementary school counselor of the year in 1981.

Frank Sutton-- Latin club 2,3,4; gymnastics3; student government4; chemistry and ski clubs3-- is an electronics technician and, he proudly announces, the nation’s only fully qualified dinosaur repairman--a position he acquired when he answered a trade journal ad, was flown to Tokyo for training and became a U.S. consultant for the Kokoro Co., a manufacturer of audio-animatronic dinosaurs installed in various amusement parks around the country.

There is a psychologist in St. Petersburg, Fla., and a cell biologist in Atlanta, both with doctoral degrees, who know what the Zephyruns were (the plural of Zephyrus, the Greek god of the west winds, and--for some reason--our senior class name).

Student body president Tom Risinger --sophomore class president; junior class representative; football1,2,3,4; basketball1,2,3,4; baseball2,3,4; concert choice1,2,3,4; Christmas king4; varsity club3,4; honor roll1,2,3,4-- a lean, smooth-talking and super-popular redhead, seemed to have everything going for him in high school, especially to a nerd like me.

But he left for college in his native state of Oklahoma and dropped out of sight after graduation.

This was the first reunion he’d attended and he seemed a lot shorter and was certainly a bit broader than he was 25 years ago. Almost all the high-school heroes seem shorter now.

Risinger said he played baseball in college, got bad grades “until I had the coach for five classes one semester” and tried his hand at a singing career after school.

A few years in local night spots scotched his hopes of stardom on stage, so Risinger took the gift of gab that had made him so popular in high school and put it to work behind a mike as a disc jockey in Oklahoma City nightclubs.

In a soft accent that underscores his years in the Sooner State, Risinger allowed as how his career never let him ascend into yuppiehood, but said he’s been happy because ‘I always had music in me, always loved it, and I still get to make my living with it.”

At least half the men in the class were in the service, most as draftees, and most of them saw duty in Vietnam.

Two classmates, Klaus Egolf and Warren Harding, are known to have been killed in action there, both in the same engagement. Egolf died the same day he arrived, when his tank company was hurled into an emergency action.

But committee organizers, despite protests from several veterans after the 20th reunion, decided that the war was still too emotional and divisive an issue and opted to ignore it completely in the program--an omission which did not raise any public comment this time around.

The Westminster High School Class of ’65 is already planning its 30th, 40th and 50th reunions. (The organizing committee has the 50th theme picked out--”Lean ‘n’ Mean in 2015”).

Figure this year’s committee leader Nancy Thompson-- girls athletics1,2,3,4; pep club1,4; fencing4; student government4; flag girl2,3,4-- to be in on the future gatherings.

She attended all the previous reunions, held at 5-year intervals, and had been heavily involved in three earlier committees. She wound up chief organizer of the 20th when the person who’d run the 15th moved away and left her holding all the files. The job, she said, just followed her into the 25th.

Her assessment of the class after five get-togethers?

“Well, I guess we turned out pretty good, with a lot of good people. We’ve got lawyers, detectives, airline pilots . . . “

Things are starting to turn out better for her, too. Her marriage to a fellow WHS grad ended recently after 17 years and three kids, and she was sort of floating out there in limbo when the 25th reunion committee started up.

She and fellow committee member Frank Sutton, a casual friend in high school, hit it off during all those months of meetings.

“We’re talking about getting married.”